The Old Therebefore // Dean Winchester

There are stories in the Bible that end before the woman in them does. The page turns, the men go on speaking, and somewhere beyond the ink a woman is left with torn cloth in her hands and ashes in her hair, carrying a sorrow the story has no intention of following home.

Maybe sorrow has always needed somewhere else to go.

Here, it travels past the white steeple and the crooked rows of stone, following the church bells until their voices disappear among the pines. It slips through mountain laurel and past the old mine mouths cut black into the mountainside, where generations of men dug so deep into the earth they brought things into the light that had lain buried longer than anyone could remember. It follows the creeks darkened by coal and sinks at last into the red Appalachian soil, where nothing buried ever seems to disappear completely.

There is an old song for what remains.

Nobody remembers the first mouth that shaped it, only that the women seem to know the words before anybody thinks to teach them. Mothers hum it and daughters remember, until generations pass and it becomes difficult to tell whether they have been carrying the song all this time, or whether the song has been carrying them.

They call it the old therebefore.

Not quite a place. Not quite a story, but something beyond the final verse, after the amen has been spoken and the men have finished saying what they came to say.

Somewhere sorrow goes when Heaven is out of reach.